Cimi’s Official Blog

Get a dramatic 2D graphics boost on your netbook 28 June, 2009

After having tried thousands of different drivers, kernel versions, patches etc etc… I’ve finally found a combination that made me excited (wohoo!).

I own a Samsung NC10 with an Intel Atom N270 and an Intel GMA 950 (i945). I’m running both Arch Linux (i686) and Ubuntu jaunty (lpia).

Few notes:

• This how to should work with any netbook, since they share almost the same hardware.
• I haven’t used a benchmark, but applications (Firefox, Gnome Do’s Docky, KDE 4 and more), and the difference is so visible that it doesn’t require a benchmark.
• I don’t know if it depends on the lpia architecture (I’m running Ubuntu lpia) or some patches applied to the drivers, but Ubuntu’s 2D graphics are a little bit faster than my Arch Linux installation with kernel 2.6.30 and drivers 2.7.1 (same versions).
• I had the boost in both Arch Linux and Ubuntu, though Ubuntu is faster.
• I’ve compared the 2D graphics with Moblin too, but its newer drivers using UXA are noticeably slower (Firefox/Gecko is incredibly slow when scrolling heavy webpages like facebook or my custom gmail).
• Newer Intel drivers (2.7.99.x and similar) support only UXA acceleration, and they perform a little bit slower than 2.7.1 without greedy migration heuristic (unfortunately that means a big difference). Greedy migration heuristic does not work with UXA.
• With this new combination, 2D graphics are really close to my Windows XP installation (Firefox scrolling).

Instructions (Ubuntu lpia combination, adjust the steps to your distro):

1. Install kernel 2.6.30 from this ppa (even if it has the “nc10″ tag, it doesn’t have custom patches and should work with any netbook).
2. Upgrade your Xorg Intel drivers with the 2.7.1 version on the same ppa.
3. Enable greedy migration heuristic creating an empty /etx/X11/xorg.conf with those lines:
   

   Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection


4. Optional: install client-side-windows Gtk+ branch (helps Gtk+ scrolling and resize).

I really hope you will get the same boost I had, and I’m looking forward to newer Intel drivers: it is just question of time… the team rewrote both xorg driver and the DRM code to ensure a great future to these video cards, and the performance drop is physiological to the transition… I suspect UXA will achieve those performance in less than a year…

Posted in ArchLinux, English, GNOME Do, GTK, Howto |

6 Replies

1. Giacomo said:
   28 June, 2009 alle 13:45

   Ah-ehm. “Greedy” basically means “do not use hw acceleration”, it’s a misleading option that should DIE as soon as possible.

2. Cimi said:
   28 June, 2009 alle 14:19

   It’s a bit different than “do not use hw acceleration”… it just tells how to manage the pixmaps to the video memory… so only a part of the hw acceleration.

   Anyway in the last paragraph I’m saying exactly the same: “let’s wait UXA to achieve the same performances”

3. Telengard said:
   28 June, 2009 alle 15:11

   I seem to remember reading that the intel 965 actually did run faster using the software renderer then hardware. I will see if I can find the reference.

4. Telengard said:
   28 June, 2009 alle 15:20

   Update: The guy over on this blog http://x3100gaming.blogspot.com/ talks about it.

5. Telengard said:
   28 June, 2009 alle 15:36

   Update 2: Doh, just realized that you were talking about 950 card. Not sure if it still applies that way but there is a link to the 950 blog on my previous post.

6. Andrea Cimitan: Get a dramatic 2D graphics boost on your netbook | Full-Linux.com said:
   29 June, 2009 alle 7:01

   [...] search Andrea Cimitan: Get a dramatic 2D graphics boost on your netbook is now available in this link…: News [...]

Leave a Comment